Abstract
The chapter outlines the origins, purpose and composition of Minimal English and explains its value as a supplement to English in its role as a global lingua franca. It argues for the great importance of cross-translatability in many contexts and shows with examples that many taken-for-granted words and concepts of Anglo English are heavily culture-laden and hence untranslatable. The chapter also clarifies how Minimal English is different from Ogden’s (1930) ‘Basic English’ and from Plain English.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The need for pedagogical materials about Minimal English is important but tangential to the present volume, which is focused on the value and range of applications. Existing resources include the textbook Semantic Analysis (Goddard 2011), the list of ‘150 Canonical Sentences for Identifying Semantic Primes and the Core Lexicogrammar of any Language’, and the ‘Chart of NSM Semantic Primes’ (the list and chart are available at the NSM homepage [short URL: bit.ly/1XUoRRV]). These resources are, however, about NSM rather than Minimal English, and they are designed mainly for linguists and linguistics students.
- 3.
The term ‘universal or near-universal’, as we use it, amounts to the claim that an identical or nearly identical meaning is found in all or nearly all languages; see Chap. 3.
- 4.
For 15 years or so before the Chinese Revolution, Ogden’s associate I.A. Richards promoted Basic in China. For a book-length study, see Koeneke (2004).
- 5.
Many other Basic phrasings used operators (verbs) in combination with directional words, for example, ‘go in’ for ‘enter’.
- 6.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the comparable classic is The Elements of Style (Strunk 1920) and subsequent editions.
- 7.
Ironically, one of the commonly cited principles of Plain English flies exactly contrary to Basic, namely, to ‘avoid hidden verbs’: ‘Verbs … enliven your writing and make it more interesting. Too often, we hide verbs by turning them into nouns, making them less effective and using more words than we need. Hidden verbs are a particular problem in government writing’ (PLAIN 2011: 23). The authors advise against ‘Please make an application for a personal loan’ (which is in the Basic style), recommending ‘Please apply for a personal loan’.
- 8.
Translations of indigenous voices and stories sometimes succumb to the appeal of high-register English words and produce distorted renditions, for example, rendering ‘they killed them, we saw it’ as ‘we witnessed the massacre’.
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Goddard, C., Wierzbicka, A. (2018). Minimal English and How It Can Add to Global English. In: Goddard, C. (eds) Minimal English for a Global World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_2
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